


Curtain Shopping

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Banter, Case Fic, Curtain Fic, F/M, Gen, LITERALLY, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 07:03:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14868993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: When Peggy goes curtain shopping, there's a good chance the curtains will be on fire by the end.





	Curtain Shopping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vita_sine_fantasy_mors_est](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vita_sine_fantasy_mors_est/gifts).



> I always wanted to write literal curtain fic.

"The checks are bright and cheerful enough to lighten up a room," Peggy declared, "but the floral would have a nice old-fashioned look." She held up the two swatches of fabric. "What do you think, Jack?"

"Please do me a favor and shoot me now."

"The florals probably _would_ look a bit fussy with the tablecloths my mother sent. Let's see if they have anything in a nice cream panel."

"Where is the real Margaret Carter and what have you done with her?" Jack looked around carefully, and followed her as Peggy attempted to maneuver her heavily pregnant body between two narrow racks of fabric wound onto rods -- there was probably precise terminology for all of this, but damned if he was going to waste valuable mental real estate on it. "She's probably tied up in a basement somewhere, wondering how no one's noticed that she's been replaced by a thoroughly unconvincing enemy agent."

"You have no one but yourself to blame," Peggy said sweetly, inspecting a flowing white fabric with lacy trim. "Oh, chiffon would be light and airy, over the sink perhaps ..."

"No," Jack said flatly, "I have no one but _Sousa_ to blame. He's the one who married you and therefore the one who should be suffering right now, the louse. Stuck in D.C., my left leg. I'm going to strangle that fink."

"Or, if I may introduce a novel concept," Peggy said as she fingered a roll of lace, "I could have come by myself."

Jack pointed at her rounded midsection.

"A most compelling argument, and yet I find myself unmoved." She looked up abruptly, her narrow gaze traveling across the store with laserlike intensity. "Oh look, valances!" 

She traipsed off across the store. Jack followed her, wondering if it was possible to strangle himself with his own tie.

"You can't even sew," he said when he caught up to her.

"Ten years ago I couldn't fire a gun, either." Peggy picked up a pair of large sewing scissors. "One can always acquire new skills."

"Yeah, well, I'd say the odds of you winning the lottery are better than you learning how to use a sewing machine before the end of the next -- Jesus Mary and Joseph!"

This last as Peggy spun around, moving with surprising dexterity for a woman who was seven months pregnant, and flung the scissors at his face. Jack ducked wildly, aware of an alarming draft as they whirled past his ear. There was a shocked yelp from behind him as the scissors sliced the arm of a hastily dodging shopgirl holding an incongruous Walther PPK that she'd produced from somewhere in the folds of her dress.

"Freeze, SSR!" Jack yelled after her, reaching under his jacket for his sidearm. "Damn it, Carter, that's my face!"

"I knew you'd dodge. She was about to shoot you in the back of the head." Peggy drew her own gun from her handbag. "SSR! You won't escape, we've guards at all the exits!"

Giving up any pretense that she _wasn't_ a Leviathan spy from the Dottie school of acrobatic combat, the fleeing shopgirl jump-kicked a row of fabric racks and sent them toppling on her pursuers.

"I knew she was there, damn it, Marge," Jack complained as he and Peggy fought their way through tangled swatches of fabric with names like velveteen and gingham (as he now knew from listening to Peggy blather about it for the last half hour, and would probably never be able to forget).

"I never doubted it for a m -- Jack, look out, she just extracted something from the heel of her shoe, and I -- is that _smoke_ \--"

 

***

 

Ten minutes later, in the blackened ruins of what had been the sewing notions floor of a major Los Angeles department store, Jack grimly handcuffed their errant spy while the sprinklers drenched them both.

"You've quite the bag of tricks here," Peggy remarked, patting her down and confiscating items. "An incendiary device hidden in one's shoe ... I should speak to the lab about it. Oh, is this a knife in your belt? Jack, look, it's hidden in the buckle. How cunning."

"I can't wait to tell Sousa about all the fun he missed." Jack wiped his arm across his face, but he suspected that all he managed to do was smear wet soot around. He winced as his sleeve grazed the fresh bruise on his cheekbone. "How's the ... uh ..." He nodded to Peggy's round middle.

"Quite fine, kicking up the place as usual," she said absently, studying the mechanism that popped out the hidden blade. "You were the one who took most of the physical risk ... speaking of which, how is your face?"

"Oh, fine," Jack said, planting a knee in the Russian spy's back as she tried to get up. "With no help from your attempt to _stab_ me in it. I'm billing all of this to Sousa's division, by the way. You're not even supposed to be on duty."

"I wouldn't say that I'm working," Peggy said. She tugged on a bit of unburnt lace, then pulled her hand away quickly when her fingers left black smudges on it. "I was shopping for curtains for our house. It's not as if I could have _known_ there was a spy working the notions counter."

"Mmmm." Jack hauled the spy to her feet and took her by a secure grip on the cuffs, his other hand steering her with a tight grip on her arm. "Say, I have a question. How in the _hell_ do you know all that stuff about different kinds of curtains? Don't tell me it's a hobby of yours."

"I read an entire stack of Ana's decorating magazines before coming here, of course." She gave him a sweet smile. "I always was one for doing my homework."


End file.
